M HKA Ensembles

Multiple, Ø 63 cm.

Collection: Speck Collection, Cologne.

"I use the streets mostly in New York because the streets are more elegant than the buildings, I think generally, and also there are great scales and there is a natural audience and that’s important to me. I have used natural landscape a great deal, like I have mentioned I wrote a hundred propositions of the geographical centre of America in 64. But I generally prefer an urban circumstance. Most of my life is mental life and it’s very exciting to be in Manhattan where there are a great number of very thoughtful people, where communication is at a very high speed and just to have so many intelligent people in a small restricted area is in itself interesting I think geographically. Like in New York I think people are half excited all the time, and so I mean there are many things… the problems of living themselves are exciting, and then when they are very sensitive to the development of ideas that appear infrequent to them or unusual, they are extremely sensitive to that, and that is landscape to me." - James Lee Byars

From: James Lee Byars / Antwerp 18 April-7 May 1969, Jef Cornelis, First broadcast: VRT 1, 28/11/1969